Leptonix looks like it will be pretty interesting, but I didn't manage to get it running. To be fair, it is marked as version 0.1, so this was not a surprise. I installed the Tortoise client for Subversion, and downloaded the entire source tree to a temporary folder. I then put the entire contents of this folder into a ZIP file and renamed it to have an ".xpi" extension. I dropped this file onto the Firefox Extensions window, and it installed with no problems. I restarted Firefox but couldn't find any UI changes that I could connect to the installation in any way. This is frustrating, because I spent some time browsing the code and there's definitely something worthwhile at the heart of it! With any luck the developer will read this and tell me what I did wrong.

Paul Walk reviews one of my recent talks in a post titled "Infrastructure Web Services." Of course I agree with everything he wrote, and I definitely can't argue with the last sentence: "He’s got a cool job, but he sure works hard for it!"

Tony Hirst also wrote a nice review of the same talk. He was going to ask me about Second Life, but it looks like one of my recentposts answered his question!

Oh yeah, while I am bragging, Joe Duck says "Jeff’s presentations are always great because he’s a very good communicator as well as experienced technical guy."

Kpaul insists that you read this blog, but it looks like you already are.

John Musser says that "With “simple” but useful and reliable services like Simple Queue Service and the Simple Storage Service Amazon is building genuine foundational components for the internet operating system." Yup, you got it!

Today I had lunch with Peter Nixey of Web Kitchen. We talked about all sorts of interesting topics, including his recent blog posting, Why XHR Should Become Opt-In Cross Domain. This posting was written in a very interesting style and compares cross-domain scripting permissions to ordering beer in a pub. Peter explains the problem, the issues, and proposes some intriguing solutions. He's obviously given it a lot of thought and has shared his thinking in the piece. It is a must-read if you think that you are building mashups or think of yourself as a competent "web 2.0" style developer.

I would be very interested in getting your feedback on this post -- is this a problem that we need to address, do you agree with his solution, would it work for you, and so forth? Reply to his post, and I'll check in to see what you have to say.

Earlier today I logged in to Second Life and was greated with an IM (instant message) and a teleport invitation from a woman by the name of Tabatha Hegel. She indicated that she knew of my interest in Amazon interfaces within Second Life, and that she had something cool to show me. I accepted her invitation and was transported to her new store, Life2Life:

There are three sections to the store and she showed me each of them. First, there are some magazines for sale on the table. Each magazine is linked to the corresponding detail page on Amazon -- touching the magazine will open up a browser on the page. Here's the table:

As you can see,the magazine covers are fully detailed and as life-like as can be:

Next, there's a 3D display of some popular books:

The books are arranged horizontally and vertically based on sales rank or other factors. You can actually walk through the collection and look at the pop-up titles. You can't see the titles in the screen shot, so you'll have to trust me on this one.

Finally, there's a book search tool! Staying true to the Second Life communication model, you simply "speak" a search command using the keyboard, and the search happens. The results are displayed organized by how well they match the search term (that's me standing there):

Behind the scenes there's a whole lot of web services action taking place. The search requests go from Second Life to some custom scripts which in turn make calls to ECS and return data in a form suitable for processing within Second Life.

This code was built by Tabatha and her development partner, Hugo Dalgleish (all names in this post are Second life names). At this point the store is a prototype and a proof of concept, and they would love to get visitors and feedback. If you've got Second Life running, you should visit Life2Life now and check it out for yourself.

Here's a picture of Tabatha; perhaps she'll be at the store when you visit:

I'm sure that some of this seems either crazy or way too futuristic to be real. I am pretty sure that I'm not crazy, but I just might be an emissary from the future. If you are skeptical, please feel free to log in, IM me, and I will be happy to give you a tour. Don't forget that web pages were the crazy and futuristic new thing just 10 or 12 years ago.

-- Jeffronius;

PS - I've written this post using my cyber-space identity, since the entire
conversation took place in cyberspace. No real names were exchanged.

Salon has published "I Make $1.45 a Week and I Love It", a very interesting article on the Amazon Mechanical Turk. You will need to watch a short ad in order to read the entire article.

The article covers the historic origin of the Mechanical Turk name, Amazon's rollout of the web site, and requesters like Casting Words and Efficient Frontier, then reviews comments that they have collected from several members of the worker community.

The comments from the worker community are very interesting and reveal the motivations behind the people who process the HITs.

Join the AWS Developer Relations team as a Developer Support Engineer and you will get the chance to exercise your programming and communication know-how. You will get to partner with and support developers who are building business critical applications on top of AWS.

Ideal candidates will have:

Working knowledge of Web services technologies, such as XML, SOAP, XSLT, and WSDL.

Lately I've been spending some of my personal time in another world, a world called Second Life, to be precise. Second Life is a 3D virtual world. When you log in to Second Life for the first time you choose your "in-world" name and you create your own avatar. Once inside, you can chat, run, walk, fly, and interact with other avatars in a somewhat life-like fashion. There's an internal game currency which freely converts back and forth to US dollars, and it is very easy to buy and to sell items from within the system.

Second Life is relevant to this blog for a couple of reasons:

First, it is a real development platform. Every object in the world can have one or more scripts inside. The scripts are written in a language called LSL, or Linden Scripting Language. The language is reasonably powerful, with multiple data types, event handlers, and a unique state-driven programming model. Best of all, there's a way to call outside web services. llHTTPRequest will call a service and fire off an event when the request completes. Return values are currently limited to 2048 bytes. There's no XML parser, but you can use the XSLT feature of AWS to map the data into something that's compact and easy for you to parse.

Second, developer Mike Buckbee (who calls himself Hal9k Andalso when he is inside of Second Life) has written the first AWS-powered application. It is a search tool, implemented as a Second Life HUD, or Heads-Up Display. You can read more about it in Mike's blog post, Amazon Search Integration. I've asked Mike to consider writing an article about what it took to make AWS calls from LSL.

By the way, feel free to look me up if you are in Second Life. My name is Jeffronius Batra.